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New trends in storage

It may seem as if storage technologies are a little stodgy and out of date, but there’s plenty of technical development going on at both big storage vendors and smaller upstarts. The enterprise data storage industry doesn’t have a reputation as a hotbed of innovation, but that characterization may be unfair. Although bedrock technologies like RAID and SCSI have soldiered along for more than two decades, new ideas have flourished as well. Today, technologies like solid-state storage, capacity optimization and automatic tiering are gaining prominence, and specialized storage systems for virtual servers are being developed. Although the enterprise arrays of tomorrow will still be quite recognizable, they’ll adopt and advance these new concepts. Solid-state cache Spinning magnetic disks have been the foundation for enterprise data storage since the 1950s, and for just about as long there’s been talk of how solid-state storage will displace them. Today’s NAND flash storage is just a decade old, yet it has already gained significant ...